What is Dukkha?

The Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet showing us how an unbalanced ballast results in a bad swim.

The Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet thinks I need to dig deeper into Dukkha itself.

The Prism of Suffering

In the Western world, Dukkha is typically translated as “suffering”. That typical translation is drawn from Siddhartha Gautama’s succinct and seminal realization under the Bodhi Tree that “clinging is the cause of all suffering”. To me, simply using a Pali or Sanskrit word for “suffering” is an inadequate icon for such a rich tradition as Buddhism. Dukkha must mean more than suffering.

According to Wikipedia, long before Siddhartha Gautama’s life on Earth, dukkha meant an off-center axle hole in a cart wheel, a bad (dus) space (kha). However, it’s not entirely clear to me from that Wikipedia article whether Dukkha refers to the off-center axle hole or the resultant uncomfortable ride on a cart with such a wheel. So is Dukkha in Buddhist terms referring to clinging – the cause of suffering, or suffering – the effect of a misaligned wheel?

Whatever the case, in the tradition of The Eternal Fishnu, Dukkha refers to the cause of the suffering. Why does Fishnu teach that Dukkha means the cause rather than the effect? “Suffering” isn’t the only word translators attempt to assign to the word Dukkha. They’ve tried practically every uncomfortable emotion there is. The notes of that Wikipedia page list among others, pain, stress, unsatisfactoriness, sorrow, anguish, misery, unhappiness, affliction …

That’s just much too complicated. A simpler way is to see that there is one cause to those many effects. As white light that passes through a prism comes out in that rainbow of colors, a single cause results in that array of manifestations of suffering. That one cause is the pitifully inadequate model of the Universe we call our brains. All those manifestations of suffering is the result of the inability of our brain to keep up with what Is now. That inability is due to the impermanence of the world, relentless change.

Change Management … HAHAHAHA!

Everything is constantly changing. Even if our eyes, ears, nose, and skin do not detect any changes, there are still countless chemical reactions happening in our bodies and everywhere, all sorts of things are going on in the homes next door, in the next town, across the ocean, and the Earth and other planets are still spinning around the Sun. Our mere 80 billion neurons and quadrillion synapses can’t possibly keep up with all of that change.

Our brains are models of the world that starts to organize from conception. We experience things through our senses, eventually recognizing things, and our brain organizes those things into a webby knowledge base of cause and effect, relationships between those things encoded with neurons and synapses. For example, if I cry, I’ll get attention. Unfortunately, at some point the rules change and that doesn’t work anymore.

Others contribute to that model by teaching us things they’ve learned about the world. Which means we save lots of our precious little time on Earth not needing to reinvent everything. We can pick up where others left off. However, this can be bad if what we’re taught doesn’t apply anymore because the world has changed.

But we still teach it because that’s the way it’s always been done. Whatever we teach others, of course we believe it to be true. At least we paint a picture that makes it look true. And so we all train each other with the same reality, whether it’s true or not.

Perpetual Beginner’s Mind

When we learn a new skill, we need to model the rules of that skill in our brains. The skill is composed of things involved with it and the relationships between those things. In our brains, it’s all synapses, wiring up of neurons – that web of cause and effect.

It takes time to fully master a skill. We start by learning the fundamentals of the skill. If we’re lucky we can relate those fundamentals to things we already know. For example, video game players are well primed to be drone pilots. If our brains happen to be primed with such prerequisites, we initially progress quickly and are called “naturals”.

If we initially progress so quickly, we may think, “this ain’t so hard”, and jump to the conclusion that we know everything. With our “green belt” skill, we will be able to dazzle almost everyone with our new-found talent. That is, except for the true masters with decades of experience under their belts. Those who have that last 10% which takes years to learn through real life experience, where rubber hits the road. That last 10% requires us, which is our pitifully inadequate model of the Universe, to rub right up to the real Universe – let the Universe polish us up.

Whether we struggle at first because we are not naturals or we later get slapped down by a “black belt”, we will either persevere or give up – both of which can be filled with suffering. In either case, not having yet crossed the finish line, we are in a state where our skill is half-baked, at an ugly stage. Not all the connections are there, or if they are, they are loose.

We will be awkward, there will not be an apparent light at the end of the tunnel. But if we persevere, at some unknown time those final few connections are made and the skill gels, it becomes “second nature”. We can execute it with not much thought, almost effortless, we make it look easy.

The problem is that things are always changing. If not changing in the world of that hard-earned skill, then in some other facet of our lives as humans. So we always need to update some skill or another and even learn completely new skills. Or conversely, we can instead hold our ground and try to make the world stay where it is – and that, my friends, is Dukkha.

The Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet called this his Metaphoric Rock. Like this metamorphic rock, through heat and pressure, we change.

The Gift of Sentience

How frustrating would it be if we played poker for money every night, but the rules changed every day at any old time? How would we become masterful at poker if it keeps on changing? The gap between the average and the best becomes narrower, so no one has enough of an edge over the vast majority to make a living at it.

And it wouldn’t be just the last rule change we’d need to be cognizant of. There may be rules that survived for decades that just changed a few days ago and we’re still overcoming that lifelong habit. We can’t escape change. Most individual creatures can’t … but the species does, through the process of evolution.

Human sentience, though, despite the price of suffering because we’re self-aware, gives us the power to learn to be anything we want or need to be at any place and time. That is unlike all other animals that can only be what their genes dictate they will be. We humans are soft-coded creatures.

Sentience is the gift to change with the change around us. And that means our brains will always be filled with half-baked, ugly stage skill. When we accept the beauty of our sentience and fully accept the half-baked stuff, we will be Dukkha-free. How do we do that? Live The Buddha’s teaching in the Four Noble Truths, and the Eight-fold path. And explore the roots of our human nature.

See that we were always Buddha, always part of everything, and that it was just the model we call our brains that thought otherwise. It’s as enlightening as it was for astronomers when Copernicus realized the Sun does not revolve around the Earth, but the other way around.

Astronomers tried all sorts of convoluted schemes to force things to add up with the Earth at the center. But it just kept covering up one mess with another. Similarly, we suffer convoluted lives because we futilely attempt to control the Universe with our brain thinking it’s reality, not the other way around. It’s that simple.

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Published by Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku

I'm just a pair of typing hands for The Eternal Fishnu and The Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet. My day job as a Business Intelligence Consultant is about modeling worlds. It is a wonderful Zen practice, which is guided by these two Teachers.
View all posts by Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku